


The Other Side of the Coin

by twistedchick



Series: Gamblers' Choice [3]
Category: La Femme Nikita
Genre: Deception, Gen, No Promises No Lies, canon-level violence, valentine op
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-13
Updated: 2009-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:45:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nikita is ordered to turn ex-cop Marco O'Brien into an operative, but finds difficulties both with him and with her partners.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Side of the Coin

Nikita stretched her arms and back as she stared at the computer screen. Operations had set her to work with Birkoff, analyzing the last six months of information as her dislocated wrist healed. She appreciated the chance to learn more about the analytical side of Section One -- that had always seemed mysterious to her -- but she was gettine tired of sitting still all the time. Her arm didn't hurt any more.

She'd been looking at a graph showing the interrelationships among dissident and terrorist groups, and the changes in their activity over time as Section teams completed successful missions. Something was missing from the calculation. She frowned. Leaning forward, she brought up onscreen a chart showing how the groups were connected, through what people or channels. Red Cell, Black Eagle, Skeptos, The Force -- all the lines went through the same place.

"Look at this, Birkoff. So many connections through this one university. Why haven't we got all the detail on the groups at the university itself?"

Birkoff's eyes narrowed behind his round glasses. "We should have that." He checked through the computer's files. "Why don't we?"

"Because we need to update it." It was Operations, who had come up silently behind Nikita to stare with interest into her computer screen. "Nikita, I'd like to speak with you for a minute."

She followed him to a briefing room, without the backward glance at Birkoff that she'd wanted to give. She knew Birkoff's eyes were on her image mirrored in the computer screen. She'd gained a lot more self-control since the start of her three- cornered relationship with him and Walter.

It hadn't been easy.

"Please, take a seat," Operations invited. She complied, and he sat across from her. "An opportunity has arisen for you to work at training a new agent. The supervisor we had planned for this mission is unavailable, and Madeleine suggested you." He raised an eyebrow at her, the Operations code for a question mark.

Operations was giving her a choice?

"Yes, of course. I'm interested."

Operations nodded. "It's to do with that 'missing information' you just noticed. You're to supervise a new operative on a peacock job." A picture of a pretty dark-haired woman in her early 30s appeared on the viewscreen. "The target's name is Natalia Kolinin; she is the administrative assistant to the political science department, and has access to all the confidential information at the university. He's to go back to her apartment with her, drug her, and use her computer to download intel from the main university computer. It shouldn't be too difficult; her boyfriend walked out on her a week ago, and she's been seen a lot in a local bar."

"Was there another way to do this?" Nikita asked. The cold- bloodedness of seducing a civilian appalled her.

"Of course, but it makes an excellent training mission. You will evaluate the operative on his work, and take care of any difficulties that come up. Birkoff will work with you on surveillance and backup." And you will be evaluated on how well you do, he did not have to say.

"And who is this new operative?"

Operations nearly smiled. "Marco O'Brien, the man you brought into Section last year. I trust you will have no problems."

"I don't foresee any," she lied. "Has he been briefed?"

"He's been told everything except who his supervisor will be for this mission." Operations surveyed her speculatively. "He knows the rules; this mission should show whether he believes in them or not. I suggest you talk with him immediately and take him to this bar tonight to pick her up." A photo of a popular dance club and lounge popped onto the viewscreen. Nikita nodded. "You can use Michael's office."

She rose to leave. His voice called her back.

"Don't go off on your own this time, Nikita. I wouldn't want him to get any bad ideas."

"Of course," she said, bowing ironically toward him as she left.

Marco stood next to Birkoff, looking over the younger man's shoulder at a succession of maps: the bar's layout, photos of Natalia's apartment as seen through her porch windows, the floor plan of her office on campus. Natalia's photo stared at them from the corner of the screen. Nikita could hear Marco whistle softly at it, until he straightened and saw her coming toward him. His expression changed to neutral; his body language screamed resistance to danger.

"Marco, I think you remember me? I'll be working with you on this mission. My name is --"

"Nikita. How could I forget?" Marco said lightly, over a layer of sarcasm. She could tell that his anger at being forced to join Section had never dimmed, but had been pushed under the surface. Regardless of how much she sympathized with it, she played it cool, and directed him to Michael's office. As soon as the door closed, he spoke.

"You in charge -- this is a laugh."

"Oh? Are you challenging my competence?"

"Not at all. I'm sure you're very good at what you do."

"You just remember that." Nikita surveyed him over the desk. He had grown thinner in the past year, and his dark wiry hair wore gray streaks that hadn't been there before. "I hope you're also very good at what you can do, or you won't make it through this mission."

He showed her a smile without any humor in it at all. "I haven't had any complaints."

"Good. I'd like to check you out on some of your other skills this afternoon. Tonight we're going to the club. Do you have suitable clothes?" She estimated his size. "I think we have something that will fit you."

He studied her. "You're different than I remembered. I'm not sure what it is."

"Does it matter, Marco? The minute you came to Section, your past was written on water, and it has already washed away just as mine has."

He looked away from her, his expression dark. "I wish it were that easy," he said quietly.

They went to a workout room, where she put him through his paces. He was fast, strong and capable, a bit more inclined toward safety than an operative should be but not so much so as to make him ineffective. After that, she wanted to see him shoot, and with him headed for Walter's office to check out several weapons and go to the shooting range one floor down.

For once, Walter wasn't anywhere in sight. Nikita looked in the adjoining rooms, while Marco stood quietly waiting for her, in the sorefooted stance of a cop who spent years walking a beat. "Wait here a moment; I'll go get what we need," she said, and headed into the long closet behind Walter's desk that connected to the weapons locker.

The door to the tool closet was unlocked, but the light was on; she could see the faint glow reflected under the door. She reached around to find the key, and froze. Walter stood in the back of the closet, just beyond the range of the surveillance camera, his back to her and his arms around someone who had long elegant legs wrapped around his waist. His jeans were a bit lower in back than he usually wore them; from what Nikita could see they were a whole lot lower than that in front. She couldn't tell who was with him. Her stomach pitched. She didn't want to stay long enough to know.

She snatched the key and closed the door -- silently, as she'd opened it -- and was selecting weapons when Walter came into the locker.

"I'm sorry, I was busy. What do you need?"

She refused to look at him. "I want to test Marco O'Brien's accuracy with some of the newer weapons."

He handed her two automatic pistols and the new lightweight, long-muzzled pistol with the built-in silencer. He'd been tinkering with it for a month. His eyes were sharp, and his mouth set. When she took the weapons, he didn't let go of them until she looked up at him.

"Are you mad at me? Is that what this is about? No promises, Nikita."

She glared back at him. "No lies, Walter."

"No lies." He let go of the pistols and handed her the ammunition clips. "Think about it."

"I'm thinking." She grabbed the clips, turned and went back to Marco.

When the two of them lined up at the shooting range, Marco's accuracy was better than hers, until she stopped imagining the target was Walter; then hers was better. Marco noticed her silence and the tension in her face; his own face grew thoughtful. After the firearms practice, and after she'd dropped off the weapons with an equally silent and belligerant Walter, she borrowed clothing from Madeleine's closet for Marco and herself, showered and dressed.

"I'd like to take you to dinner tonight before the mission," she told Marco, who appeared handsome in his borrowed suit. He looked up at her quizzically. "Trust me, you'll do much better on a full stomach."

"Whether I have a stomach for the work or not? You're probably right. Where are we going?"

"There's an Italian restaurant a block or two away from the club that has good linguini and veal. We'll check in with Birkoff in the van before we go into the club."

Marco nodded. They'd already picked up weapons and communications equipment, and were ready to go. A driver from the Section was to take them to the restaurant. Marco got out first, to come around and open her door for her. As he did this, Nikita whispered to a listening Birkoff, "Go on visual only until I tell you, or unless there's trouble. I need to talk to him."

"Careful, Nikita." Birkoff warned, but cut the audio link. The restaurant had been wired for a while; he'd be able to see everything in the place from several angles if necessary. He'd always been very good at reading lips; if Operations needed to know what had been said, he'd be able to reconstruct it.

A table had been reserved for them, and they were seated by a side wall where Nikita could observe everything in the room without being immediately visible. They ordered dinner, but Marco seemed too quiet. She tried to get him to open uip and talk to her but couldn't get him past the smallest of small talk. Finally she said, "All right. We're on our own here; I've told Birkoff not to listen unless I signal him first. If you want to say something, here's your chance."

Marco's face went blank with surprise, then became cautious. He put down his fork and said, "I don't think I can trust you, but I can't trust anyone else in there either."

"You're right about that. What is it?" Nikita asked. She saw more pain in his face than she would have expected; she'd anticipated some performance anxiety, but nothing of this nature. His file had said nothing about chronic impotence. "If it's the mission, I don't think you have anything to worry about."

He shook his head. "No, it's not." He leaned forward, under the pretense of handing her the basket of freshly baked rolls, and asked, "Is there something between you and Walter?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Don't kid an ex-cop. That scene in his office today had 'lover's quarrel' written all over it. It just surprised me, since he's gay."

"Oh?" She felt her eyebrows rising and tried to look politely curious instead of wary. "Has he propositioned you?"

"Not in so many words, but yes, while he was fitting me for body armor. I declined," Marco said. "He's not my type."

Nikita nodded. "Was that what you wanted to tell me? You don't look that upset about it."

Marco looked her in the eye. "I'm not. I don't care if Walter's bonking everyone in Section, including Ops. I wanted to ask if you can do something for me."

Now she did feel wary. "Such as?"

"Can you check and see how my family is doing?"

This could get dangerous. "Marco, we're your family now."

He shook his head. "You don't understand. I don't want to get in touch with them. I don't want them to know what I've turned into. I just want to know if my wife is all right, and if I have a daughter or a son." He saw her face change from cautious to concerned. "Mia was eight months pregnant when you brought me in. She didn't have an easy pregnancy, even without what happened to me." He spoke softly, quickly, as if he expected Birkoff to turn on the mikes at any moment. "I know, if she finds out about me or about Section she'll die. I don't want that. I just want to see a picture of her and know that she's all right, and that the baby is all right." His eyes pleaded with her.

"It's very dangerous," she told him.

"Didn't you leave anyone behind who cared about you?"

She shook her head. "You tell me; you've read my file."

"What I saw in that file had nothing to do with the woman I'm having dinner with," Marco said. "You have an interesting reputation in Section One; you still have a conscience, regardless of your training. If things had turned out differently, you'd have made a good cop."

"They would've had to be a lot different." Her mouth turned up at the corners into a wry smile. "Thanks, I think."

"So?"

"No promises, but I'll see what I can do."

"Thank you." His voice was sincere. "I appreciate it. I'll owe you one."

"Just do your job, and don't get killed, and that will be payment enough."

His eyes met hers, and it sank in that he wasn't the only one being tested. Unexpectedly, he gave her a smile full of charm. "Is it too late to order oysters?"

She relaxed a little. "I'll give you some of my mussels marinara; that will have to do. But somehow I don't think you'll need the aphrodisiac."

They arrived at the club an hour later, got drinks at the bar and took over a table in a corner of the room where they had an unobstructed view of the dance floor. Nikita adjusted an earring, turning on Birkoff's comm unit. "Where are you?" she asked him.

"Just outside. She's coming in now," Birkoff said in her ear. "Right," she said. She started to point out Natalia to Marco, but he had already noticed her. "Keep me posted," she told Birkoff. She opened her purse and slid a small packet toward him. "Knockout drops, with a slight hallucinogen added to confuse memory. Use one drop in her wine glass; it takes effect quickly. Three drops will kill. When she wakes up she'll think she imagined it all."

Marco's eyes were on Natalia, in her green dress. "I don't think I'm going to have a problem. When do you want me to start?" he said absently, as he dropped the packet into his pocket.

"Right now," she said quietly, then raised her voice. "I just can't take it any more, Kevin. It's over between us. I'm leaving you for good, you _pig_!" she said, counting on the last word to hit him like a brick.

It worked. His face froze for a second. "Clever bitch," he said, under his breath. "Sara, let me explain," he said, louder and a little pleading. "It's all lies."

"I don't believe you," Nikita said angrily. She picked up her purse, knocked over their drinks and stalked away from him, out the door and into the van.

"Good," Birkoff said as she shut the door. "He's wiping off his tie, and going back to the bar." He shot her a sideward glance. "What was that in the restaurant?"

"He's worried about his wife." She watched Marco move to the bar, near Natalia, and strike up a conversation with the bartender.

"He doesn't have a wife any more," Birkoff said.

"He knows that. He just wants to know if she's well."

Birkoff grunted. "Yeah, sure. You're really torqued at Walter, aren't you?"

She stared at the screen. "Yes, aren't you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Oh come on, Nikita, he's not married. None of us are." "I don't see you shagging the help in the broom closets."

"I don't have to -- I have a room down the hall." His voice was flippant. "How do you think we feel when you're on a mission like this one? You think we get turned on, knowing what you do to get what Section wants?" He pointed to the screen, where Marco had struck up a conversation with Natalia at the bar.

"It's not the same thing. I don't have any choice," she pointed out.

"So that makes it right? And what Walter or I do is wrong?"

Marco and Natalia seemed to be getting on fine. He was telling her that he'd split up with his girlfriend some time back, had tried to reconcile but that had fallen through and he wasn't going back to her. Natalia, looking sympathetic, had started to tell Marco about her ex-boyfriend.

"I don't know if it's right or wrong. It just makes me so mad that he lied to me."

"How did he lie, Nikita? Did he tell you he'd be faithful always?" She shook her head, staring at the screen. "Did he say he only liked women? You know that's not true." She shrugged. "So, you're mad that he didn't tell you ahead of time that he gets sweaty with Annie from Accounting or Claude the Carbine every once in a while. Is he supposed to clear it with you every time he wants to get laid?"

"No!" The word echoed in the van, startling her, and she dropped her voice nearly to a whisper. "He just didn't tell me there were others."

"You should have expected it. God, Nikita, sometimes you are so dumb. After all this time in Section, you don't understand the principles of protective coloration."

She gaped at him, totally unready for this line of reasoning. He was quick to follow it up. "Does it bother you that you're not the only one I sleep with?"

"Besides Walter? Not really."

"It's the same thing."

"Is it?"

Birkoff put his hand on her arm and pulled it until she looked him in the eye. "You better think it's the same, and start acting like it, or you'll lose him. He's not used to feeling tied down. I know," he said, forcing her to acknowledge that he did know what he was talking about. She nodded reluctantly. "If you want him, let him go and don't fuss when he corners Annie or Claude or whoever. Push him, and you won't get him back."

His grip felt too tight on her arm, and she shook him off, not without trouble. "You think I should do nothing?"

"Just do one thing."

"What's that?"

"Shut up about it."

She glared at him, but his attention was on the computer screen. "They're off to her place." He tapped the panel behind the driver, and the van moved out of its parking place and headed toward an apartment complex, following Natalia in her sportscar, with Marco in the passenger seat. Marco was smiling and talking easily with her; his hand strayed over the back of her neck and into her wavy brown hair as she drove, and she smiled at him and speeded up a little.

They parked the van in the alley behind Natalia's apartment building. When Marco and Natalia entered her apartment, she waited impatiently until she suggested they have a drink. She watched closely as Marco took the bottle of wine from Natalia to open, and waited until her back was turned. He tipped a drop into the bottom of her wine glass from his hidden packet, poured the wine in immediately and made sure to give her that glass.

"How long's this gonna take?" Birkoff complained. "I want to watch the Knicks game when we get back."

"As if you'll get the chance," Nikita retorted. If the mission succeeded, Birkoff would spend several more hours analyzing the data they brought back.

She watched impassively as Marco and Natalia kissed, took each other's clothes off and went to bed together. Birkoff observed their activity as if he were birdwatching; ho-hum, another spotted warbler. He nodded in appreciation at some of Marco's technique, at which Nikita turned her eyes to heaven and sighed.

"Just taking notes for later," Birkoff informed her. "When are those damn drops going to take effect?" she fussed.

"Right now."

Natalia slumped in Marco's arms, and he laid her back gently on her bed and checked her pulse. Satisfied, he took something that looked like a small box from the inside pocket of his suitjacket and went to her computer. He plugged it into a port on the back of the machine.

"How long will it take?" Nikita asked.

"Not long. It should download the main computer inside two minutes and have room for the soccer scores if we want them."

"What is this sudden fascination with sports?" Nikita looked at him quizzically.

"What do you want me to be interested in?" he asked her, his eyes owlish.

"Never mind."

Marco had dressed quickly; as soon as the download finished he tucked the box into his shirt pocket and headed for the door. As he walked past Natalia's kitchen his jacket caught on the corner of a chair. He pulled it free and left the apartment.

"Got it, where do I go?" he asked quietly.

"Down two flights, out the service entrance on the side," Nikita told him.

He stood still, as if he couldn't hear her, and headed toward the stairs in the opposite direction.

"Something's wrong. I'm going in," Nikita told Birkoff. She slipped into the building, crossed the basement to the far stairwell, and started climbing.

Up two flights, she met O'Brien in the stairwell. "Why didn't you respond?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "You didn't reply when I spoke."

She looked him over carefully. "Where's your lapel pin? You had it when you went up there."

His face dropped. "It must have fallen off when my coat caught on the chair. I'll go back up for it."

"Take these," she said, handing him a ring of lockpicks. "Be quick about it. I'll wait for you in the stairwell." She ran up the other two flights with him, and watched through a crack in the door as he let himself into the apartment.

He was gone only a few seconds before he closed the door again and moved toward the stairwell. She emerged, shaking her head at him. "Give it to me," she said in an undertone. She pinned it back onto his lapel. "Birkoff? You there?"

"Loud and clear."

"We're going out the side door."

"Right. See you there."

She put her arm through his, and they rang for the elevator. When the elevator arrived, it contained a janitor with a cleaning cart, who leered at Nikita. She ignored him and looked instead at the cart, which held what looked like a lot of broken equipment. The janitor turned his attention toward Marco, who straightened and stared him down. As she looked up again, from her position just ahead of Marco, she saw the janitor bring up a 9-mm pistol with a silencer in a tattooed hand. She punched the emergency stop button on the elevator. The elevator jerked to a stop between floors.

Marco pulled his pistol and shot the janitor -- in the leg. Nikita kicked the man before he could react, knocking away his weapon, caught it in midair and shot him in the shoulder with it. They tied and gagged the man with his own cleaning rags, shoved him into the cart and covered him with more rags. She restarted the elevator and sent it to the basement, and they pushed the cart out to the waiting van.

On the way out, she told Marco he should have shot to kill, not to lame. "I've spent twenty years learning not to fire at people."

"You'd better unlearn it fast," she told him, "if you want to stay alive in Section." He nodded, uneasily. "You're not a cop any more."

"Why are you keeping him alive?"

"Madeleine will want to question him."

Birkoff opened the back door for them, and they loaded the cart with its passenger into the van for the trip back to Section One.

"Ops is going to love this," Birkoff said.

"Why?" Marco asked her.

She turned over the janitor's bound hands and pointed to the area between the thumb and forefiinger on the left hand. "Aside from the fact that janitors don't usually carry automatics," she said, "he's wearing the tattoo of Skeptos." Sure enough, it was the crescent and crossed bones of one of the newest terrorist organizations. "He should prove very useful to us." "I should have caught that," Marco said.

She shook her head. "You should have shot to kill when he raised that gun in the first place."

Operations met them as they came in pushing the cart. He snapped his fingers and one of the Housekeeping staff took the cart away. "Well?" he asked. Marco handed him the computer box and he nodded, handed it off to Birkoff, and waved them into a room for debriefing. After their reports, he dismissed Marco, who left with a long look at Nikita. Operations turned back to Nikita and repeated, "Well?"

"Keep him," she said.

"Based on what?"

"His skills are good, he has a certain talent for this kind of work, and he thinks well."

"He wasn't thinking well when he dropped his combadge, was he? You went beyond orders again, Nikita," Operations said. "Fortunately, this time the outcome was good. We've been looking for a way into the Skeptos organization for some time, and this should give us what we need."

"Then you agree with me," Nikita stated.

"Don't push it," Operations told her. She stared him down. "You have a lot to learn."

She shrugged. "I haven't been here as long as you have. Do you want me to continue working with him?"

Operations considered her for a moment. "Yes. I want you to work on his hand-to-hand combat skills for the rest of the week. After that, he goes elsewhere -- if he survives. If you can't break him of reacting like a cop, he'll be put in abeyance."

Abeyance -- the last step before cancellation. One wrong move from there and Marco's life would be over before he knew it.

Walter was at his desk when she checked in her weapons and comm gear. Neither of them said anything. Nikita went home, feeling tired and alone.

Over the next three days she tried everything she could think of to undo Marco's police training. She pushed him, over and over, to force him to fight her with his full strength. She taunted him, but he ignored it. She said everything she could think of, all the harsh language of the streets she used to run in. Marco's eyebrows rose, but he tolerated everything she said as if she were calmly discussing the weather. Nikita went home at the end of each day racking her brain to think of a way to reach him, and physically exhausted by the hours of training. She was grateful, for once, to be alone in her apartment.

On the way to meet him the fourth morning, Birkoff called her over to his console. "Some of this stuff you brought in looks really good," he told her. "Especially this." He pointed to the screen and moved his finger down in a vertical line. Then he moved his finger back to its starting point and traced an arc to the right that ran through several changes in the calculations. He nodded to her. "Don't you think so?"

Nikita caught her breath. "That's very interesting, Birkoff. Thanks for showing me."

"I should have something more concrete later," he said. She nodded at him and went off to the workout room. Marco was already there, and they began to spar, just the same as yesterday and the two days before that. She tried to intensify the exercise but he resisted. After a short time she stopped him.

"I'm fed up with having you patronize me," she told him. "Do you think you're better than me because you're an ex-cop and I'm an ex-addict? Or because you fought crime and I just tried to survive in the streets?" She countered his punch easily. "Or are you trying to pay me back for bringing you in here in the first place? Come on, take it out on me. I want to see what you can do, Marco. C'mon, see if you can take me."

"You want to get hurt, don't you?" Marco answered.

"Oh, you think you can hurt me. I don't think you can, Marco. I think you're a fake. You were a rotten cop, and now you're a rotten operative."

"You think I can't cut it, do you?" He threw a punch at her that she countered easily with a kick. "Cop-killer."

"Fake. Show me something real," she told him, "if you've got anything real."

"You got it," he growled. He lunged at her, and the deadly dance began.

This time he used his whole strength and every dirty fighting trick in a New York cop's black book. Nikita countered him with street tricks and Section training, but it was an exhausting and brutal fight. Neither of them gave an inch, and the punishing intensity of the blows began to show on them both.

Birkoff noticed Madeleine and Operations standing motionless before a viewscreen of the workout room. He put that view on his own screen, and drew a breath he couldn't let out, frozen by what he saw. Walter, who had been walking past on the way back to his own desk, moved behind him and looked over his shoulder, leaning on the back of Birkoff's chair.

Nikita was countering punches and landing kicks, but she was starting to favor the arm that she'd injured a month earlier. Marco's reactions were starting to slow, but he refused to back down. His face was bruised, and he was starting to breathe hard. He managed to grab her sore arm and twisted it, shoving her brutally into a wall.

Walter's grasp on the chair tightened, and he muttered obscenities under his breath. Birkoff scarcely knew he was breathing at all. Nikita had to be in terrible pain, from the look on her face. Suddenly she walked up the wall, kicked off and launched herself into one of the high flips the three of them liked to do during workouts -- something no other operatives had learned to do yet. In flight, she pulled her arm away and wrapped her legs around Marco's shoulders to send him crashing to the floor. She pinned him to the mat with her full weight on him forcing him down.

"You're dead, Marco. You're dead to that world out there. You want to be dead in here too?" she growled at him. He tried to shake his head, but couldn't do it with the hold she had on him.

"Dead cop. Fucking stupid dead cop."

"I'm not a cop," he snarled.

"Prove it." She felt blood trickle down her cheek from a cut near her eye.

With a mighty push, he threw her off and went after her.

Now he was determined to kill this woman who had taken away everything he loved, and she was fighting back for her life. She was fighting a man as skilled as anyone in Section, who had no incentive to play by the rules, so she threw any remaining caution out the window. She dodged, she countered, she attacked and defended, wearing him out, waiting out the anger, until she could take him down.

But he got through. He wrapped his hands around her neck, leaned in close to her, and said in a voice hoarse with exhaustion, "Well? What do you say now?"

"It's a girl," Nikita whispered, too low for the microphones in the room to pick up.

The hands loosened slightly. "What?"

"You have a daughter. Your wife is fine."

Marco stared into her eyes, until the words sank in. "And?" "You'll live."

He let go of her and they both crashed to the floor, exhausted.

Birkoff let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. He switched his screen to the systems analysis he'd been working on earlier. Walter forced his fingers to let go of the back of Birkoff's chair, and realized his hands were as stiff as they'd been when he froze them in the Korean winter decades earlier, hiding on the wrong side of a border. He watched Operations and Madeleine turn away from the screen in utter silence and walk away.

It seemed like an eon before Nikita could push herself up to her knees, and then to her feet. She pushed the blood on her face away from her eyes with the back of her good arm, and looked over at Marco O'Brien. He had come by stages to his feet, and stood looking at her. Slowly, he bowed to her, one hand covering the other fist, in the salute of an Oriental warrior.

"Thank you for the lesson, Sensei," he whispered. "Harness it," she tried to whisper back. Somewhere she found the strength to bow. "Use it."

When she left, she went straight to the infirmary. The medic who'd strapped her arm up a month ago when she'd dislocated her wrist was on duty; he shook his head but said nothing as he strapped her wrist again, tended to her bruises, stitched the cut on her browbone and patched together other small cuts elsewhere. She passed out, exhausted, as he worked on her, and came to a few minutes later to find Operations looking down at her with a strange expression. She decoded it a moment later, but still didn't believe what she saw.

"Was it necessary to go to such lengths?" Operations asked her. "You're going to be useless in the field for another week."

"Are you going to put him in abeyance?" she asked.

"No."

"Then it wasn't useless," she told him. When he looked impatient, she added, "You're always telling me to throw myself into the work. This time I did."

"So I noticed. A little more discretion would be appreciated in the future." Operations left.

Madeleine had been standing behind him. When Nikita saw her, she pushed herself to sit up. "You went beyond good judgment," Madeleine told her. "There was no need to let him kill you in order to break his training. What does Section gain if it loses an operative in order to train another one?" "I didn't want him to be cancelled. He's a good man."

Madeleine looked steadily at her. "It's hard to let the children go when they grow up, but all mothers have to do it. Even you."

"What?"

"You brought him to life in the Section; that makes him your child, doesn't it? Now you have to let him go on to wherever he will, knowing you've done your best for him."

Nikita nodded slowly.

"I'd like you to go back to working with Birkoff this afternoon," Madeleine said. "I have some research I want Marco to do."

"As soon as I've had something to eat, I'll be there," Nikita told her.

By the time she made her way to the chair next to Birkoff, she moved a little more loosely; the painkillers had taken effect. She eased into the chair carefully and asked him to show her what he wanted done. He told her, in a voice notably less sarcastic than usual, and left her to work. She noticed that he kept giving her sideward glances, as if he wanted to ask her something.

"It worked," she said quietly. "Thanks."

Birkoff nodded as if to himself. Nikita sipped her coffee cautiously through bruised lips, and stared at the computer screen.

"What about the data O'Brien brought in?"

"Not a complete waste of time. I'm correlating a couple of leads the janitor had with the data from the university computer. It should give us a way inside their structure."

"Well, at least I got a good dinner out of it," she said.

He looked at her sideways, a cautious slanting glance, and let his elbow push a few pieces of paper slowly toward her. She pushed it back, extracting the small photo hidden under it, and found an opportunity to hide it in her wrist brace.

At the end of the day, she got a lift back to her apartment house from a friend of Birkoff's, a courier who was going out on assignment. She limped in, avoiding the view of the other residents, and made her way into her apartment. She wasn't hungry, just terribly tired and sore, but with a level of peace beneath it all; she'd saved Marco O'Brien's life. That night she slept soundly.

In the morning, she could barely move. She phoned to check in, and was told that she wasn't needed and could take the day off. That suited her just fine. She prepared food, laboriously, and ate it as she sat by the window in an easy chair, watching the way the light moved over the buildings of the city.

The knock at the door woke her out of a brief doze; she'd been falling asleep in the chair. It was Marco. She let him in.

"Birkoff asked me to bring you this," Marco said, handing her an audio tape. "It's a band he thought you'd like to hear."

"Thanks," she whispered.

"God, I really did a job on you, didn't I? I'm sorry, Nikita."

She looked him squarely in the eye. "Don't be. Your life depended on it." She looked around the kitchen. "Would you like a cup of tea?"

"Yes, thanks." He leaned on the counter as she moved slowly in the kitchen, noticing her stiffness and the places where she had bruises from his blows.

"Come choose what you want." He went to stand beside her at the counter, and saw what she had in her hand: a small photo of a woman and a baby sitting on a park bench, with a man standing behind the bench and leaning forward to play with the baby. He drew a breath, and his knees felt weak.

"Her name's Marcella. There were no problems in the birth," Nikita told him. "Do you know the man with them?"

Marco nodded slowly. "Sean Phillips. He's a good cop. We went through the academy together."

She hesitated, then said, "They're getting married."

He wiped away a tear that coursed down his cheek. "Good. They'll be good for each other." He picked a teabag out of the cannister and laid it next to the photo.

"Will you be all right?"

"I will now," he said. He didn't speak again until she handed him the cup of tea and they sat down on barstools by the counter. "You didn't have to put yourself at risk for me."

"Maybe I did," she said. "Don't waste it by trying to see them again."

He shook his head as he sipped the tea. "I won't." After a while, he said, "Marcella was my mother's name." "Mia believed in you. That's a gift to treasure."

"I will, even in hell." He gave her a quirky smile. "Has it ever occurred to you that Section One is a lot like nonconsensual S &amp; M, without safewords?"

She considered the idea, and nodded. "I hadn't thought of it that way. To me, it's more like a war."

"I can live with that." He sat brooding over his tea for a while, and she watched him, wondering what he was thinking. When he saw her eyes on him, he spoke.

"For what it's worth," Marco said slowly, "I don't think you did kill that cop they sent you up for. I think you were framed. If I could, I'd find out who did it and take him down for you."

"Thank you." Unexpected tears came to her eyes, tears of relief. "You're the only person who believes I didn't do it."

Marco shrugged. "You watch people long enough, you notice things. You're as much of a killer as the rest of Section, but you didn't do that crime; for one thing, back then you wouldn't have been capable of it. I wish..."

"Don't worry about it. I've been here too long to be able to go back to life outside," she told him, knowing she was lying. He knew it too. "This is not the life I would have chosen, but it's better than what I had."

This time he looked at her with understanding, hearing the truth in her words. In his eyes was a memory of the thin, frightened punk he'd seen in passing at the jail, the defiant street kid who kept insisting on her innocence when all the evidence said she was lying. Someone else was lying, instead. He promised himself that if he ever had a chance to find out what happened, he'd do it.

As he left, he kissed her on the cheek, carefully, avoiding the bruises he'd made. "Thank you."

"Stay alive," she told him. He kissed her again and was gone. As soon as he left she burned the photo, crumpled the ashes into dust and washed them down the sink.

A couple of hours later, as the sun dropped lower in the sky and tinted the skyscrapers with rose and gold and violet, the second knock came at her door. She realized she'd almost been expecting it. In the old days, it would have been Michael, coming to check on her like a jealous mother hen. Now, it could have been anyone. Rather than try to speak, she looked through the peephole. Walter.

She opened the door a couple of inches, and found that she couldn't say anything. It took too much effort. She just looked at him standing there in his leather jacket and jeans, as out of place in her quiet hallway as a Hell's Angel at a flower show.

"May I come in?" he asked, after a moment. His voice held none of the bravado and rough humor it usually did.

She opened the door so he could see all of her, the strapped wrist, the bruises, the stitches. He reached out to run a gentle finger over her cheek. Even that light a touch hurt, and she winced. His hand dropped.

"Are you still mad at me?" he asked, only the shadow of belligerence in his voice.

She shook her head. "No ... promises."

Don't ask me to be someone who doesn't care.

He took a deep breath and let it out. "No lies, Nikita."

Ask what you want, tonight. Require of me what you will.

She knew she would not ask. She could require of him nothing beyond what he would freely give. Compulsion was Section's tool, not hers, and she would not use it on him.

She opened the door and let him in.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written during the second season of La Femme Nikita on US tv (1998-99).


End file.
